Wired spoke with Bethesda's Todd Howard about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and he described for them how in addition to scripted quests, the Radiant quest system in the imminent RPG sequel will offer an infinite supply of procedurally generated quests. "The vibe of the game is that itís something that you can play forever," says Howard. He stresses this will not just be random chores, but rather an extension of lessons learned from development of Fallout 3, as they worked on motivating players to explore a vast game world. "With Fallout, itís not as beautiful a world to everybody. We had to find ways to make exploration of [a destroyed wasteland] interesting," he says. "The world is probably the one thing that sets [Skyrim] apart from other games. It feels really real for what it is Ö Itís just fun to explore."

Beamer wrote on Nov 9, 2011, 13:06:I can't think of a single example of fun procedural stuff. It always makes me think of SoF2 and how horrible its randomly generated maps were.

Yes, I know, X-COM was mostly random, but by the 30th or so UFO crash I want to poke my eyes out with a stick, and those games were about the combat, not exploration.Yes, I know, NetHack, but comparing ascii with lots of fun items to a real world...

Wait, Diablo. Diablo worked. Sure, there was very little variation and sure, all the quests were preconstructed, but it was actually fun exploring those levels.

I love Procedural type games, even when it makes some embarrassing levels, I haven't seen a perfect one yet so i'm not expecting this game to finally do it. To name a few of my favorites:Civilization, Darwinia, Spelunky, Dark Cloud II, Minecraft,Strange Adventures of Infinite Space, Dwarf Fortress, Star Control II, Xcom was a TBS from 94 sooo I'm not going to blame it's lack of scenery on the creators. Any rogue-like variant is going to have simple randomly generated dungeons and what not that's part of the idea behind them.